On 29 June 2020, Sotheby’s held an auction that included one of the last paintings Frida Kahlo ever painted. The small work, which she completed while confined to her bed, was her contribution to the Peoples for Peace Congress held in Vienna in 1952. Sotheby’s estimated that “Congreso de los pueblos por la paz” would sell between US$400,000 and $600,000. It sold for more than two million dollars above the highest estimate: the gavel came down at $2,660,000, an astounding price for a work that, by consensus, is a minor one in the artist’s oeuvre.

I followed this auction closely for two reasons. First, my grandmother visited Frida Kahlo in Mexico City when she was working on the painting. They had been acquaintances for decades, having met when Frida and her husband, Diego Rivera, had visited her in Yucatán. Grandmother had written about this visit in one of her many journals. It confirmed the second reason for my interest: Frida was deliberate in making that painting a statement about Mexico’s African legacy.

* * * * *

Mexico was convulsed by the election of Lázaro Cárdenas in 1934, when the Great Depression gripped the world. He launched a six-year plan to rescue the nation’s economy, focusing on social programs to address the immediate needs of the Mexican people. This was consistent with the approach other countries took: Franklin D. Roosevelt was crafting what would become the New Deal, transforming expectations of the federal government’s role in providing for the general welfare of the American people.

Politics aside, what captured the Mexican imagination was the simple fact that Cárdenas was widely believed to be Afro-descendant. Colonial Mexico, everyone knew, boasted more Africans than any other region of Spanish America. In the words of Colin Palmer, the renowned Jamaican American historian, “Africans in Mexico left their cultural and genetic imprint everywhere they lived. In states such as Veracruz, Guerrero, and Oaxaca, the descendants of Africa’s children still bear the evidence of their ancestry. No longer do they see themselves as Mandinga, Wolof, Ibo, Bakongo, or members of other African ethnic groups; their self identity is Mexican.”

With Cárdenas elected, there was an awakening among intellectuals that Mexico’s African legacy should be explored, examined, and embraced. After all, if Mexico’s African legacy was evident in the face of the beloved president, then who else might boast a similar legacy?

* * * * *

The decision of Americans to exclude indigenous peoples from their society—codified in the “Indian removal” acts—made U.S. society one in which Black America and White America are pitted against each other. In this showdown, White America has always had the upper hand, inventing tropes to intimidate and humiliate Black America. Blackface and minstrel shows, for instance, are examples of the racist hostility of White America toward Black America. This extends even to produce. Consider, for instance, the principal fruit introduced to the Americas from Africa: the watermelon.

The watermelon, Citrullus lanatus, is a flowering plant first domesticated in West Africa. It arrived in the Americas aboard the same ships that brought enslaved Africans. In the United States, after the Civil War, the watermelon became a trope to ridicule Black America. Just as statues of defeated Confederate military officers were erected in public places throughout the vanquished former Confederacy during segregation to intimidate Blacks, culinary traditions were weaponized.

“[T]he stereotype that African Americans are excessively fond of watermelon emerged for a specific historical reason and served a specific political purpose. The trope came in full force when slaves won their emancipation during the Civil War. Free black people grew, ate, and sold watermelons, and in doing so made the fruit a symbol of their freedom. Southern whites, threatened by blacks’ newfound freedom, responded by making the fruit a symbol of black people’s perceived uncleanliness, laziness, childishness, and unwanted public presence,” William Black wrote in The Atlantic.

In Mexico, however, the watermelon came to symbolize the culinary legacy that the first Africans brought with them, a sweet gift to be enjoyed.

Thus, it’s not a coincidence that two of the giants of twentieth-century Mexico—Rufino Tamayo and José Vasconcelos—came from Oaxaca, a state that boasts one of the largest Afromexican populations in Mexico. Vasconcelos served as Secretary of Education (1921–1924) in the Obregón administration to great success. He championed the idea of the mingling of the races so as to form a new, hopeful “cosmic race.” This idea, of course, echoed Walt Whitman’s declaration in “Song of Myself” of what it meant to become an authentic American: “Of every hue and caste am I.” E pluribus unum, anyone?

Vasconcelos suspected he had African ancestors; Tamayo was convinced of his.

The proliferation of watermelons in Tamayo’s still life paintings was homage to his—and Mexico’s—African legacy. “Seré zapoteca, pero cuento con la herencia de África” (“I may be Zapotec, but I have an inheritance from Africa,”) he said, boasting of the cultural and racial mix of contemporary Oaxaca. Watermelons thus began to proliferate throughout Mexican art. Today, it seems every middle-class Mexican home has a painting of a watermelon somewhere.

It’s important to note one historic curiosity that shaped the nature of Mexico’s African identity: African men were welcomed in Colonial Mexico, but not African women. The Viceroys saw slavery as a temporary evil. They didn’t want to emulate the British colonies — or other Spanish holdings in the Caribbean — and find themselves in a situation where slaves were giving birth to slaves. In consequence, African men in Colonial Mexico married indigenous women, and their mixed-race children were born free.

Hues and castes intermingling over the centuries in this manner give rise to doubts about one’s specific ancestry. Now, enter science. Today, it’s possible for anyone to analyze his or her DNA. Family lore and histories, embraced or repressed, can have a definitive answer. When Francisco Toledo, the acclaimed artist who died in 2019, for instance, took a DNA test, it confirmed what he knew in his heart all along. He was ecstatic with delight when I met him through Henry and Rose Wangeman, proprietors of Amate Books in Oaxaca City: “¡Con solo escupir en el tubito, así de fácil se confirmo mi historia!” (“All I had to do was spit into this tube, and then my history was confirmed!”) he told me.

But if Tamayo chose the subtlety of watermelons to affirm exclusively the culinary legacy from Africa, Toledo was more blunt. Yes, he used watermelons as a subject of his art, but in Slave Ship (2015), his head is floating high, though he is manacled and chained to a ship of enslaved men and women. Tamayo envisioned himself the heir of the free African Conquistadors who fought alongside the Spanish; Toledo allied himself with those who were brought over enslaved. (Colonial Mexico relied on African slaves to remedy the labor shortages in Spanish America occasioned by the epidemics that decimated the indigenous peoples throughout the entire hemisphere.)

This leads us back to Frida’s painting. In her journal, my grandmother wrote:

I went to visit Frida. She didn’t look well. What can be expected given all the strong pain relievers she’s taking? She was working on her new painting, which she is going to send to the Congress to be held in Vienna. Her body’s exhausted and her painting suffers for it. The precise brushstrokes and details have slipped into history. … She also told me that she added two watermelons as a tribute to Tamayo. ‘Now that Rufino discovered that among his ancestors he has the first Africans who accompanied the Spanish, the watermelons he paints are recognition of the sweetness of Africa,’ she told me. … ‘I’m encouraging my toad [Diego] to paint his own watermelons too,’ she commented, laughing. ‘The time’s right,’ I said. And then we continued with our talk of gossip … When we said goodbye, she asked, ‘Is this the last time you are going to visit me, Raquelita, Raquelita?’ ‘Of course not, my dear,’ I replied. But she was right. … I fear that when I return [to Mexico City], it is very likely that she will have died by then.” (See note below for full text of journal entry.)

In Mexico, watermelons also honor the dead. There is no definitive answer as to how this started, but it did. The more reasonable explanation is that when an African man arrived in Mexico, lived with an indigenous woman, and raised a mixed-race family, there was resignation that his descendants would not be entirely African. As the decades passed and these men died, the family gathered around and combined Catholic, indigenous, and African burial rites. One tradition from Oaxaca was offering foods and beverages to the dead.

Watermelons loomed large at the funerals for Mexico’s first Africans—in honor of the bounty of the lands of their birth. In time, the fruit became associated with Day of the Dead—Día de los Muertos—in Oaxaca. (Day of the Dead is a regional festivity, although today it has a national and international following.) The inclusion of watermelons in Mexican art is more symbolic than aesthetic; it’s a nod of appreciation to the nation’s African diaspora.

Frida plagiarized herself in “Congreso de los pueblos por la paz”, copying almost everything from “Naturaleza viva”, also painted in 1952. Both paintings contrast night and day; both have a white dove; both have roots forming words. In Congreso, however, there are two explosions, one at night and the other at daytime. There is also a tree in the foreground, bearing fruit. There are sliced watermelons, one for day and the other for night, life and death. “However debilitated she was when I saw her,” I remember my grandmother telling others in several conversations over the years, “she was very sure of including watermelons in the painting she wanted exhibited in Vienna.” Frida, indeed, included the watermelons to make the larger point that other artists were making at the time: Modern Mexico is not Mexico without its African heritage.

And so, in honoring Mexico’s African legacy, Kahlo was, in a way, anticipating her own symbolic—and aesthetic—death. When she finished this painting, she had less than two years to live. After she died Diego—her beloved toad—fulfilled her wish. He painted watermelons.

Note: Full text of journal entry

“Pasé a visitar a Frida. No la vi bien. ¿Qué se puede esperar, con todos los fuertes analgésicos que esta tomando? Estaba trabajando en su nueva obra, la que va a envíar al Congreso que se realizará en Viena. Su organismo esta agotado y su pintura sufre por lo tanto. Sus pinceladas precisas y los detalles han pasado al pasado. Y su nueva obra me pareció muy similar a “Naturaleza viva,” particularmente con el uso las raíces del árbol para escribir letras. Me dijo que quería viajar a Viena para asistir al Congreso, pero, en sus condiciones, eso es una ilusión. También me comentó que añadio dos sandías como un homenaje a Tamayo. “Ahora que Rufino descrubió que entre sus antepasados cuenta con los primeros africanos quienes acompañaron a los españoles, las sandías que pinta son reconocimiento a lo dulce de África,” me dijo. “Así debe de ser si queremos ser la raza cósmica como nos enseña Vasconcelos,” le respondí. “Estoy animando a mi sapo [Diego] a que él pinte sus propias sandías también,” me comento, riéndose. “Es hora,” le dije. Y seguimos con nuestra plática de chismes … Al despedirnos, preguntó, “¿Será esta la última vez que me vas a visitar, Raquelita, Raquelita?” “Claro que no, mi vida,” le respondí. Pero tenía razón. Estaba mal — y no sé cuando voy a regresar a mi adorada capital azteca. Temo que cuando regrese será muy probable que, en ese entonces, no la alcanzaré con vida.”

References:

• William R. Black. 2014. “How Watermelons Became Black,” The Atlantic, December 8, 2014.
• Colin Palmer. Undated. “A Legacy of Slavery.” Smithsonian Education website, [3 Sep 2020]
• Walt Whitman.“Song of Myself,” Section 16.

Published or Updated on: September 24, 2020 by Louis Nevaer © 2020

Louis Varela Nevaer, Director, Casa Catherwood in Merida

The post Frida Kahlo’s Homage to Afromexico appeared first on MexConnect.

Good Reading

Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in poetry — Shooting Script: Door of Fire

Mexico poems by Bill Tremblay

Eastern Washington University Press, 2003
Available from Amazon Books: Paperback

Decades after their deaths, Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera continue to fascinate us, compelling us to still pay attention to them, through works like Frida: A Biography, by Hayden Herrera (1983); or, derived from Herrera’s book, Frida (2002) — starring look-a-like Salma Hayek — a movie that should have won a few Academy Awards; or Frida (2002) by Barbara Mujica… which presents Frida through the eyes of her jealous sister Christina; or very recently The Lacuna, by Barbara Kingsolver, about a writer who spends much of his younger life as part of the household of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, during tumultuous times.

Bill Tremblay is the author of several collections of poems, including a favorite of mine, Duhamel (1986), which is a sequence of poems about a hero Tremblay created.

Shooting Script: Door of Fire (2003) is likewise a sequence of poems about several “heroes:” Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, Leon Trotsky, with bit parts from Trotsky’s wife Natalia, actress Paulette Goddard, surrealist Andre Breton and others.

We see them — Diego, Frida, Leon — as if we are watching them through a camera lens. Three people driven by obsessions. Through the “eye” of the “poet’s camera,” we capture them at their worst, at their best, in the privacy of their desires… erotic and political and artistic; we witness their successes, their failings, their longings, and almost become party to them. We “see” through a series of scenes that are subsuming, scenes that — like the characters themselves — are symbolic of something beyond what the camera, given only a moment, can capture.

It is evening when the camera first pans down a “sky/the color of hammered copper” to the terrace where sit “Diego, in 20 gallon/white Stetson, Frida in denim workshirt….” Around them “workers brick up holes,/turn the hacienda to a fortress to give their guest/the exile from the assassins everyone knows are coming.” The workers are “beating the Blue House to death.

“Frida “raises her head to ask: — Why clean house for a dead man?”

The “dead man” that is coming is Leon Trotsky, the rightful heir to Lenin’s Russia, now usurped by the more savvy and much stronger Stalin (a name he adopted from the Russian word for steel).

The camera shifts, to the porthole of a Norwegian steamer, where “Leon watches morning fog rise above Tampico.” Leon expects Stalin’s assassins will “finish us on the docks.” Instead “a native queen,” Frida, “…steps forward/in her blue Tehuana dress” to welcome Leon and his wife Natalia, “still buttoning,” to the New World. Leon is not prepared for Frida. “Her youthful eyes gleam obsidian, their depths/rock him like a tugboat bumping the ship.”

Diego, back in his studio, offers champagne to the striking Paulette Goddard (a major star in the ’30s and ’40s). Let’s listen in on some of the dialogue: Diego asks:

—How is Mexico treating you?
—At the bullfights this matador dedicated his victory to me.
Then some jerk said the bull-fighter was an amateur.
I said, ‘Maybe, but the bull’s a professional.’
He settles Paulette down on pillows.
She looks, from that height, at his zipper: — Now what?

Shortly after Trotsky and Natalia settle into the household of Diego and Frida, the intellectual (and inexperienced) Leon, initially titillated, now becomes obsessed with the fascinating and bold (and much more experienced) Frida: “His eyes/focus on Frida holding a Taoist cue-ball,/staring out to a future Leon imagines as/him….”

Together, Diego and Frida and Trotsky and Natalia climb the Pyramid of the Sun. At the top, they gaze down in awe, except for Natalia who “sneers with the blasé of a tired/Parisian cab-driver.” Diego tells Trotsky he sees him as the Sphinx. Trotsky smiles, “I am a riddle.” “Frida leans into him,/he suns himself in her gaze,/her warmth melting his Ukrainian ice.”

Frida, who is eager to feel fully confirmed as a revolutionist, is ardent to consummate her relationship with the man who, but for a political injustice, would be the leader of contemporary Russia and of world communism.

Let’s look at the following scene in detail. In the studio of the Blue House, the camera first moves to Leon, looking at “a painting of a woman lying on a brass bed” and then to Frida who “picks up a rose made from a tin can with shears….” Frida leans on Leon who is anxious to help her down the stairs and to her bed, “the four-poster with its white canopy/on which a doll resembling her sleeping self is perched.”

Frida sits on the chenille bedspread as Leon studies a painting on the arched ceiling… of “Moses holding a staff over the waters, with his third eye open.” Frida, intent on re-directing his attention, compliments him. Look at the mastery with which Tremblay now develops the latent eroticism between Frida and Leon that up to this point has left us longing for something more. Let’s move in close with the camera:

—You are a flame that gives hope to the poor.
He laughs: — ah, so that’s how you see me.
Leon takes a red papier maché goat mask from the wall.
—Careful. He who dons the mask becomes the god.
—I know, and then is killed, a human sacrifice…
—If he who wears the mask is the god, there is no human sacrifice…
Through the mask he sees Frida unbuttoning her blouse,
unfastening her body-cast with its painted
Corinthian column, cracked in six places.

* * * * *—

It’s amazing you can walk at all…

—Please, no pity. I’m not sick, I’m broken.
but I’m happy to be alive as long as I can paint.
She holds up, examines, her hands: Can you know my longings,
you, who’ve already made history?
—Are you going to take a siesta?
—Not alone.

* * * * *Frida loosens his tie, unbuttons his collar, and peels off his coat:
—What do you need from me?
Frida lies back on her pillows, softly:
—I need a new fire, a vortex, a… Leon kisses her throat:
&mdashI need someone to love me, not this name I stole from a Siberian prison warden…
With you, I could be a man like other men…
—I hope you won’t be. With Diego, making love is like
being rolled over by the entire Gulf of Mexico…

As they make love for the first time,

She kisses, bites, his lower lip. Leon winces, his blood
stains his tongue… How do gods make love,
except with a wounding kiss? In every love
there’s a victim, Leon… I am Diego’s… Natalia is yours…
You are mine…

But others are preparing to make Leon a victim as well. The Russian propaganda machine has successfully vilified him to much of the world, has re-cast him as evil. Even as he left the ship to set foot on Mexican soil for the first time, he saw, in the crowd of supporters, a placard raised high: “Go Home Traitor.” The relentless Russian police already have rooted out his comrades and killed them and soon will find his son.

But Leon is tired. He tells Diego he would like to have a dozen white rabbits to care for. Now he thinks less about revolutionary ideals and he thinks more about Frida, almost thirty years younger. He writes her a love letter:

“Before me lies the bright green strip of grass beneath your wall, the clear blue sky above, and sunlight everywhere. Life is beautiful. Let the next generation cleanse it of evil.”

Surrealist André Breton arrives, and he is immediately struck by the intensity of artistic and political and erotic passions that drive daily life in The Blue House. Studying Trotsky’s political writings Breton tells Diego that “his call to/permanent revolution is to permanent revelation” and that Trotsky writes “as a poet might, who refuses to fall asleep/in the arms of his last good metaphor….” Studying a painting by Frida, Breton falls to his knees, kissing her feet: “Your painting is like a bomb wrapped in ribbons./This is what surrealism’s meant to be, pure and cruel.

Of course we know this particular story, told to us now in Shooting Script: Door of Fire, must move toward its inexorable and tragic conclusion, one that causes Diego to reflect, “Whatever history says will be a shallow lie.”

Poetry tries to pull out a truth from experience now passed, perhaps not exact in details but close enough in essence. When poetry is successful, it lifts us into a deeper understanding of “what happened.” When poetry is most successful, that deeper understanding is also about “what happens to us.”

Shooting Script: Door of Fire, is one of those (many) fine books that most reviewers passed by. I found the book last September in a little store in Colorado, where I suspect it had been sitting on a dusty shelf far too long. But suddenly, as I also almost passed it by, it leaped off the shelf and insisted I take it to lunch. Two fascinating hours later I decided to take it back with me to Mexico, where it somehow belongs.

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Did You Know…?

This month, Mexico celebrates her birthday, the anniversary of her independence from Spain. On the evening of September 15, the annual El Grito ceremony is held in town plazas all across the country. For several days prior to this celebration, town plazas are besieged by vendors selling national flags in a tide of nationalistic fervor. The story of the national emblem (used on coins, documents and the flag), an eagle devouring a serpent, while perched on a prickly-pear cactus, is well known. Or is it?

The conventional version is that this unlikely combination represents a “vision” that was of crucial importance to the Mexica, an ancient tribe originating somewhere in northern Mexico. According to legend, the Mexica were told by their Gods to migrate southwards and establish a new settlement. They would know they had found the right place when they saw an eagle clutching a snake while perched on a nopal cactus. After years of wandering, they finally saw their sign, and began building Tenochtitlan. Tenochtitlan eventually became a large and wonderful city, the capital city of the mighty Aztecs, who presided over a massive empire.

This is a great story, but certain details may not be quite as straightforward as they seem.

For starters, were the Mexica really looking for a place where an eagle, serpent and cactus coincided? All the known sources for this legend date from after the early sixteenth century and the Spanish Conquest. Among the early depictions of the founding of Tenochtitlan, many show only an eagle perched on a cactus, with nothing in its talons. Even in those cases where the eagle does have something in its talons, the object being clutched is usually either a bird or a tuna (the fruit of the nopal). Attempts to put the depictions in some kind of chronological order appear to indicate that those with a serpent are later than those with a bird or tuna.

As a result, some anthropologists have argued that the conventional story is a revisionist re-interpretation of history. The snake was added some time after the Conquest, perhaps as a potent reminder to the natives that their non-Christian religion (represented by the serpent) had been crushed by Spanish military might (represented by an eagle).

To make the story even more confusing, the “eagle” isn’t really an eagle at all! The bird depicted in ancient codices, and now shown on the national coat-of-arms, has a crest. The only eagles or members of the eagle family sporting a crest in Mexico are the Harpy Eagle and the various Hawk-Eagles; however, all these birds are confined to tropical southern Mexico. According to ornithologists, the bird on the national crest is most likely to be a Crested Cara-Cara ( Polyborus plancus). The Crested Cara-Cara, a member of the Falconidae family, is common throughout the country. It feeds chiefly on carrion, but also eats insects, frogs and… snakes.

So, the story of a Cara-Cara sitting on a nopal cactus eating a tuna has been gradually transformed by time into an Eagle sitting on a cactus devouring a serpent…

What is more, September 15 might not be the right day to celebrate anyway, since the first grito actually took place not on September 15 (1810) but in the early morning of September 16.

As Mexico celebrates her official birthday, and national symbols are on show everywhere, take a close look, and remember that perhaps not all the symbols you see are quite what most people think they are!

¡Viva la serpiente! ¡Viva el Cara-Cara! ¡Viva México!

This article is the basis for Chapter 18 in the author’s Mexican Kaleidoscope: myths, mysteries and mystique (Sombrero Books, 2016).

Further Reading:

• Duverger, Christian (1087) El origen de los aztecas. Editorial Grijalbo. Originally published in French.

The post Did You Know? Some national symbols in Mexico are not what they seem appeared first on MexConnect.

Westwords

The September 13, 1847 capture of Chapultepec Castle by U.S. Marines made a paragraph in a MexConnect listing of significant events by geographer, historian and all-around good guy Tony Burton.

This was war. Fighting had reached Mexico City. Men were dying. Generals surrendered but there were numerous acts of bravery, including the celebrated stand by the “Child Heroes”, which, Tony said, some modern historians believe never happened.

Oh my. Sorry to hear that, Tony. Disturbing to think that this very good story might be switched from fact to fiction.

Mexico has many myths but this was a wonderful truth, six military academy cadets, in defiance of Gen. Nicholas Bravo’s order to retreat, choosing to fight to the finish. They were lieutenant Juan de la Barrera, 20, Agustin Melgar, Vicente Suarez, Francisco Marquez, Fernando Montes de Oca and Juan Escutia. One by one they were struck down.

When all was obviously lost and their tattered flag was destined to fall, Escutia, 17, proudly took it down, wrapped himself in it and jumped from the castle point.

Legend has it that when the smoke cleared and the American commander was surveying the carnage around the old fort, he spotted the body wrapped in the flag and saluted. Warriors respect patriotism.

Most Mexicans know about the war and what was lost and how the young cadets refused to run. It is an elementary school lesson. Children memorize the names. Streets, parks, schools and squares throughout the country keep them alive. Their images have been stamped and preserved on Mexican money.

Fathers still take sons to see their monument in Chapultepec Park. I suppose some shed a tear. Los Niños Heroes are from a terrible time in Mexican history.

The country, newly independent, was weak, disorganized, bickering politically, struggling economically and grappling with the church. Along came the ambitious, prospering United States to take cruel advantage.

U.S. President James K. Polk saw America as a morally correct nation expanding westward and veering a few feet south. To Mexicans, it was an awful invasion.

The war was a mismatch. Some Mexican leaders were far more motivated for political gains than national defense. The army was short on resources and organization. Instead of supply teams, Mexico looked to women who followed the troops to provide food.

Lack of medical support was demoralizing. It meant the wounded were often left behind.

Compared to that chaos, the United States had a professional volunteer army, even horse-drawn artillery. Mexico didn’t have a firearms factory and tried to get by with European discards.

The fight was not very popular. Some areas just weren’t interested. Everybody thought the invasion was unjust but violence was traumatic and so discouraging.

The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ended the war, forfeited control of Texas and established the border of the Rio Grande River. Mexico ceded what became California, Nevada, Utah, and parts of Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico and Wyoming and received $15 million U.S. dollars as compensation.

That was less than half what had been offered when people in high places were talking about a nice, friendly, all-cash real estate transaction. Mexico said no.

Eventually there was an actual sale. Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna accepted $10 million more for the Mesilla Valley in lower New Mexico and Arizona. History can be harsh.

There is little dispute about the cold, hard facts. Nobel laureate Octavio Paz said it was “one of the most unjust wars of conquest in history.”

Abraham Lincoln, in an address before the U.S. Congress, said President Polk had “unnecessarily and unconstitutionally commenced a war with Mexico.”

Only the post-war spin was different. Mexicans believed half their country had been captured and taken. Americans, not all that excited about continuing discussion, claimed the 500,000 square miles had been bought and here are the receipts.

Mexicans said it was worse than a crooked deal, it was a cruel conquest. Americans seized that word and asked how Mexico became Mexico. The original Aztec empire was a product of conquest, the strong taking from the weak.

Now we know words can be a game of Scrabble, going all the way back to the Chapultepec Castle and los Niños Heroes.

Children is a misnomer. The cadets were young men. But there is nothing wrong with the word heroes — unless Tony concludes the whole deal is a myth.

Published or Updated on: December 1, 2009 by Marvin West © 2009

The post Child heroes and Mexico myths appeared first on MexConnect.

Tony Burton’s Mexican Kaleidoscope is a whirlwind trip through some of the underpinnings of Mexican culture, told with humour, affection and well-documented facts. This readable compendium of little known stories made me want to revisit many places I’d already seen. How much richer my experiences would have been had I been able to take this user-friendly and easily carried tome of gems with me when I was in Mexico.

Obtain your copy on Amazon!

Mexican Kaleidoscope is divided into five sections:  Before the Spaniards, Spanish rule, Independent Mexico, People and society, Culture and beliefs. Each section contains six enlightening essays given over to a special topic pertaining to that category. The headings may sound like heavy reading, but don’t be fooled. If history books were written with the light touch Burton gives to each chapter, more students would opt for a major in history. He is a consummate story teller and concise distiller of information, getting to the heart of a story in three succinct pages. One can open the book anywhere and have a satisfying read. I treated the book as a box of truffles where I could pick and choose at will whatever pleasure suited me, knowing the whole box was too good to leave even a crumb behind.

The book left me hungry for more. There are a number of places I’d like to revisit after reading Mexican Kaleidoscope.  My travels with back story from Burton’s book would have made many of the places I had been to so much richer than they were when I was there. A few of the chapters made me regret places I hadn’t been to, and it stimulated my desire to return to Mexico to visit those areas I had overlooked.

Burton’s benign affection for Mexico brought back warm memories. In one of his chapters he writes about the birth of the Mexican railroad. Before reading Burton’s book, I hadn’t given much thought to the often stately railway stations that varied so much in style from place to place, and have since morphed into other uses or have been abandoned altogether. But I will never again be able to walk past one of these buildings without thinking of the rich history that they hold. The section brought to mind a train ride I had taken from Mexico City to the Yucatan in the mid-sixties. The journey was so rich in sensory experiences that the memory is still vivid. I remember the locals at every station plying their food and wares through the open train windows. The dining tables with their pristine white table cloths in the elegant dining cars made me think of art deco European cafés. But mostly, it was the terrain the track passed through that captured my imagination and fed the senses.

It’s a loss that the train ride to the Yucatan no longer exists, though the history of its recent transformation interests me. Burton writes that Jalisco is reconstituting 75 miles of former rail routes as Green Route Trails for hikers and cyclists. The tracks of the Mexico railroad were built through beautiful country, places that the highways haven’t been able to duplicate, so I imagine these newly opened trails will pass through much of Mexico’s natural beauty.

If I had the stamina of my youth, I’d be eager to hike along those trails, remembering how the vegetation grew wild along the tracks, reminding me that Mother Earth still had the upper hand in Mexico. It’s sad that the railroad has lost out to the airplane – so much lost to the senses. Behind the exotic train ride that I had taken are fascinating stories intertwined with the history of the country, and they make for good reading in Mexican Kaleidoscope. Had I read Burton’s book 50 years ago, I would have gotten so much more out of the journey I took.

Mexican Kaleidoscope not only tackles historical events in a unique and refreshing way, it also brings in fascinating and colourful characters that have left an indelible imprint on the culture. For instance, the cross dressing maid Conchita Dorado who gave an appropriate meaning to the concept of alternative reality long before Donald Trump picked up the torch, though in the case of Cohchita, there was subtle wit and an owning up of dastardly deeds to dull whatever damage she might have done.

Another fascinating character was Eulogio Gregario Clemente Gillow y Zavalaza, the first Archbishop of Antequera, so different from Conchita Dorado, but just as individualistic in his ability to shift perception. These personalities as well as the Mexican violinist Julian Carillo who changed our perception of musical notation, and the painter known as Dr. Atl, who did the same for art, are given their due in Burton’s book. They are so representative of the out-of-the-box thinking that has always defined the Mexican people and the creativity inherent in the culture.

Though Burton’s book is filled with fascinating tidbits of history, I liked the fact he also touched on current concerns, especially where it affects the Tarahumara and Huichol people. The Huichol, a tightly-knit community held together by their strong spiritual beliefs and cultural isolation, are at risk of losing their rich heritage through integration with the outside world. Their creative work, an integral part of their spiritual world, has undergone commercial deterioration due to its popularity with tourists. I’m fortunate to have several works of art done by the Huichol from a time when the culture’s creative output was less commercially driven. They are powerful and uplifting, and I never tire of them. I appreciated Burton mentioning where authentic pieces are available for purchase, and encourage people to pay the asking price so that the work can maintain its integrity. As for the Tarahumara, it’s heartening to know their voices are finally being heard in the Mexican courts, though the fight for their rights has been ongoing for a long time and still has a ways to go.

On a lighter note, a perusal of Burton’s book will enlighten you on the number of lives of a Mexican cat and give you insight into the country’s whistling tradition as well as a slew of expressions that have no equivalent in another language. I was especially intrigued to learn that one of the world’s best known popular songs, translated into 20 languages, was written by a Mexican woman, Consuelo Velasquez, long before women’s liberation.

I also enjoyed reading about Mexico’s early cross pollination with the black and Filipino population. I had wondered about the origin of certain words as well as certain food stuffs, but now have a better perspective of the cultural evolution of the country. There are also hints that Romans may have had contact with the country long before the coming of the Spaniards, and they too, have left their footprint, or more literally their imprint as seen on the bricks of Comalcalco’s pyramids in the coastal plain of Tabasco. The Mexicans have taken the best of many countries and incorporated them into their culture, and have still managed to keep the flavour of their indigenous roots.

Last but not least, I want to offer a word of appreciation for the drawings by Enrique Velazquez scattered throughout the book. I’m already familiar with his work and still have a reproduction of a watercolour painting he did of my home in Ajijic many years ago. I arrived too late to buy the original, the piece having been purchased on the spot by someone renting my house when I was in Canada. I still regret its loss. Seeing the work of Enrique Velazquez in Tony Burton’s book brought back some good memories of the years I had spent in Mexico. He was an excellent choice for the artwork in Mexican Kaleidoscope.

Tony Burton’s book is a celebration of Mexico. It’s written with a genuine love and appreciation of the country, making it a delightful treasure for anyone who has fallen under the spell of its rugged mountains, vast deserts, lush jungles and cultural diversity. Aside from what it has offered me as a sentimental journey into a culture where I’ve spent a good deal of my life, it is a keepsake for my next trip to the country. Mexican Kaleidoscope is an easy to carry travel guide to both known and lesser known places. Unlike travel books that are mainly an overview of “how to navigate” this is a book of “how to appreciate.”

•   Buy your copy from Amazon!

Published or Updated on: April 11, 2020 by Rita Pomade © 2017

The post Mexican Kaleidoscope – Myths, Mysteries & Mystique appeared first on MexConnect.

Did You Know…?

Thousands of dinosaur bones have been found in northern Mexico.

Bones literally litter the ground. Here’s a femur; there’s a tibia; vertebrae, ribs, skulls…

Dozens of dinosaurs, including the world’s cheapest, have been unearthed in a broad belt across northern Mexico, from Baja California and Sonora in the west, through Chihuahua, and Coahuila to Nuevo León and Tamaulipas in the east. Dinosaurs lived from around 230 to 65 millions years ago. Most of the dinosaurs dug up in northern states date back about 70 million years, though those found in the Huizachal canyon in Tamaulipas include the oldest known dinosaur bones in Mexico, from the Jurassic period 180 million years ago.

Coahuila’s most famous dinosaur was discovered at Presa San Antonio, some seventy kilometers west of the state capital Saltillo. Between 1988 and 1992, excavations on ejido land, led by Dr. René Hernández of the National University (UNAM), succeeded in recovering more than 70% of the bones of a herbivorous Kritosaurus. When reassembled, the creature was 7 meters (23 feet) long and stood 3.8 meters (12.5 feet) tall. It also became the cheapest dinosaur in the world. Excluding Dr. Hernandez’s salary, its excavation cost just 15,000 pesos, equivalent at the time to 5,000 dollars. Making a replica for the Institute of Geology Museum in Mexico City cost a whopping 40,000 pesos. The replica (218 bones) is named “Isauria”, apparently because one of the first high school students to view it was overheard to say that it looked just like Isaura, one of their fellow students!

The second location is even closer to Saltillo. The Rincón Colorado ejido is 43.5 kilometers west of the state capital along federal highway 40, the road to Torreón. Here, a small village, located three kilometers north of the road, boasts Mexico’s only “on-site” paleontology museum, complete with lots of dinosaur bones and imprints. Visitors to the museum can also obtain permission to visit the dig, located a short distance away on arid, red-tinted, scrub-covered hillsides, one of which, formerly called Cerro de la Virgen, is now known as Cerro de los Dinosaurios. Bones litter the ground, and more than 20 dinosaurs, dating from the Late Cretaceous period, have so far been found in an area of 25 square kilometers. They include specimens of duck-billed hadrosaurs, one of which still sports its toenails, horned ceratopids (three rhinoceros-like horns on the head), carnivorous tyrannosaurids and dromaeosaurids. Triceratopid still had some skin attached to its bones, very rare find, due to precise mineral-rich conditions of its burial. Hadrosaurs are particularly common and may have been amphibious, though those found here were presumably not very successful at it!

The displays in the Rincón Colorado museum reveal the wide diversity of fauna that once thrived in this area, including fish, turtles, crocodiles, sharks, bivalves, gastropods, ammonites as well as a considerable variety of flora, as shown by tell-tale signs of at least nine different kinds of fruit. Today’s vegetation is much less varied, consisting primarily of plants like agaves, prickly pear cacti, creosote bushes and acacias that can survive in the harsh semi-arid conditions.

Visitors to Coahuila today not only get the chance to see dinosaur bones but with a little perseverance and luck can also find some of the ancient petroglyphs in this part of the state that archeologists think may date back to 4,000 B.C.

In the neighboring state of Chihuahua, the chronicles of early travelers describe finding giant bones in the desert. In recent years, a team of Mexican and American researchers has been working at a site 13 kilometers (8 miles) from the Rio Grande, where numerous hadrosaur leg bones were found protruding from the ground in 1999. This region, a desert today, must once have had a fauna as rich as that found in southern Coahuila 70 million years ago. Specialists in the group are especially interested in the smaller animals that lived in the swamps, and have already found and cleaned hundreds of fossilized mice teeth. This site lies well inside the 50-kilometer-wide corridor along the border that the Mexican government wants to designate as an ecological reserve and is not open to the public.

Fortunately, for those who want to see dinosaurs but don’t want to go traipsing out into the desert in Coahuila, there are some excellent alternatives. One option is the paleontology museum in Ciudad Delicias, 85 kilometers south of the city of Chihuahua. The two cities are connected by a four-lane highway, so the driving time between them is about 50 minutes. The museum is downtown at Avenida Rio Chuvíscar Nte. #2, (Tel: 614-474-4068). The museum is open daily (modest entry fee) from 9:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. The museum’s exhibits were amassed patiently over more than 20 years. They include not only dinosaurs, but also numerous other marine and terrestrial creatures, as well as minerals and meteorites. The fossil collection on display is one of the most important in the country.

Another option is the world-class Desert Museum (Museo del Desierto), opened in 1999 in Saltillo. Its paleontology area includes Isauria. The museum is in the Parque las Maravillas (Prolongación Pérez Treviño No. 3745; Tels: (844) 410-6633 / 6632)

While in Saltillo, and given that many scientists believe that all birds are descended from dinosaurs, be sure to visit the Mexican Bird Museum (Museo de las Aves de México). The museum, which opened in November 1993, houses 2350 specimens of 670 different species, collected over more than 50 years by ornithologist Aldegundo Garza de León, in the Antiguo Colegio de San Juan, a former Jesuit college, three blocks south of the main plaza. Its excellent web-site contains a wealth of information about Mexican birds, including some stunning audio-visual clips and images that can be manipulated to be viewed from different angles.

While signs of dinosaurs have also been found further south, in states like Michoacán, Puebla, Oaxaca and Guerrero, it seems that Mexico’s best dinosaur-hunting terrain is the incredibly rich fossil zone that straddles the states of Chihuahua and Coahuila.

Where To Stay:

In Saltillo:
For a hotel full of character, try the Hotel Rancho El Morillo
Prol. Obregón Sur y Perif. Echeverria
Apdo. Postal No. 304
Saltillo, Coahuila 25070, Mexico.
Tel: (844) 417-4078 Fax (844) 417-4376
E-Mail: reservaciones@elmorillo.com
It may be slightly difficult to find (download a map from their website) but is an interesting place to stay, and you may even find a remnant of dinosaur bone in your room since this is the hotel that was used by most of the dinosaur researchers!

In Ciudad Delicias:
Probably the best hotel in Delicias is the Casa Grande, a refurbished XIX century hacienda, converted into a family-run hotel and restaurant, located just 6 blocks from the Palaeontology Museum, at Ave. 6a. Oriente No. 601. It has 70 rooms and offers all services.
Hotel Casa Grande
Ave. 6a. Oriente # 601
Delicias, Coahuila 33000, Mexico.
Tel: (639) 474-0404 Fax (639) 474-0404

Sources:

• Fosiles de Dinosaurios en Coahuila. Gobierno de Coahuila (SEPC) (no date) – pamphlet
• Hernández H., René Dinosaurios. Gobierno de Coahuila (SEPC) (no date) short book

Text and all photos © Copyright 2005 by Tony Burton. All rights reserved.

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Did You Know…?

José María Narváez (1768-1840) is one of Mexico’s forgotten heroes.

Captain George Vancouver is usually given the credit for exploring the Georgia Strait and discovering the site of the city that now bears his name, but actually José María Narváez y Gervete was the first European to sail and chart those waters a full year earlier in 1791.

Narváez has been largely overlooked in history, perhaps because, in the words of historian Jim McDowell who has produced a wonderful biography of Narváez, he probed northwards “as an uncelebrated 23-year-old pilot in command of a small sloop, the Santa Saturnina, and longboat.”

Born in 1768, probably in Cadiz, Narváez entered the Spanish Naval Academy in April 1782 at the tender age of 14, and soon saw his first combat at sea. In 1784, he sailed west, visiting various places in the Caribbean, as well as New Spain.

In February 1788, he arrived to take up an assignment at the naval station in the busy Pacific coast port of San Blas. For the next seven years, he explored the coast to the north, including the Strait of Georgia, which today separates Vancouver Island from the city of Vancouver. He also sailed to Manila, in the Philippines, Macao and Japan.

In the summer of 1791 Narváez, on the orders of Captain Alejandro Malaspina, sailed his sloop, which was less than forty feet long, into the strait of Georgia (then more grandly known as El Grand Canal de Nuestra Señora del Rosario la Marinera!), and continued past the mudflats at the mouth of the River Fraser as far north as Texada and Ballenas islands, before turning back to reprovision his vessel. Like any good cartographer, he charted his route carefully as he went.

His motivation, as Boshier has ably stated, was because, “The place now labeled British Columbia was thought to contain the throat of the fabled Straits of Anian which led from the Pacific back to the Atlantic. Whoever pushed through this strait would secure considerable power, authority and prestige for their king.”

The following year, Captain George Vancouver was understandably distressed when he was shown the Narváez chart and realized that the Spaniards had gained a clear lead in the race to map the coastline and might beat the English in finding the Anian Straits. In the event, neither side won, since the Straits proved to be a figment of earlier sailors’ imagination.

Narváez returned to his base in San Blas, Mexico. On October 23, 1796, he married María Leonarda Aleja Maldonado in her hometown of Tepic. The couple raised six sons and a daughter. One of his great-great-great grandsons became President of Mexico: José López de Portillo, who held office from 1976 to 1782.

After 1797, Narváez busied himself mapping different parts of Mexico’s west coast. In 1808, he surveyed the route for a new road between San Blas and Tepic. In November, 1810, at the start of the War of Independence, Narváez found himself unable to prevent San Blas from falling to the insurgents. His superiors tried to court-martial him for failure to defend the port, but Narváez successfully argued that the real cause had been a lack of firepower, since his men had only 110 rifles and shotguns at their disposal.

Over the winter of 1813-1814, Narváez was ordered to sail across the Pacific once more to take Spain’s new constitution to Manila.

On his return, he was summoned to Lake Chapala, where a group of determined insurgents had installed themselves on the island of Mezcala and were refusing to surrender. General de la Cruz requested help from the Spanish Navy, and Narváez duly obliged. The Royalist troops and the rebels agreed an honorable truce in November 1816, by which time Narváez had begun his map of the lake. He completed the map the following year, and several years later had produced a truly fine map of the entire province of Jalisco, a scaled down version of which, with updated boundaries, became the first official map of the state in 1842.

Narváez’s map of Lake Chapala was the earliest scientific map of the lake, and was adapted, with only minor modifications, by many later publications. The map shows the lake to have a maximum depth of 13.86 meters (45 feet) just south of Mezcala Island. Most of the central part of the lake is shown as having a depth of about 12 meters (39 feet). These depths are rainy season values; the dry season depths would probably be about one and a half meters (five feet) shallower.

Following Mexico’s Independence in 1821, Narváez decided to remain in Guadalajara with his family, though his official discharge from the Spanish navy was not granted until May 25, 1825. By that time, he had been appointed Commandant of the Department of San Blas, and had been searching for an alternative location for a major port, since San Blas “has the great defect of not being more than an estuary, incapable of receiving boats that draw more than twelve feet”.

Narváez, the long-overlooked sailor and cartographer, went on to draw many more maps, before he died in Guadalajara, at the age of 72, on August 4, 1840.

His numerous contributions to the accurate mapping of both Mexico and Canada have received surprisingly little recognition, except for a small island named after him off the west coast of British Columbia, and the name Narváez Bay for a gorgeous little bay on Saturna Island (a contraction of Saturnina, the name of his vessel), in the Gulf Islands National Park.

Sources:

• McDowell, Jim. (1998) José Narváez. The Forgotten Explorer. Including his Narrative of a Voyage on the Northwest Coast in 1788. Spokane Washington: The Arthur H. Clark Company.
• Narváez, José María (1816-17) Plano del lago de Chapala. Guadalajara de la Nueva Galicia.
• Narváez, José María (1840) Plano del Estado de Jalisco. Guadalajara.
• Boshier, Roger. (1999) Mapping the New World. Education and Technology Research. Part 1: “Neutral” Technology. Vancouver: University of B.C. September 1999. Accessed on line, July 13, 2008

Illustration, copyright Gordon Miller. All rights reserved. Original location.

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Did You Know…?

A young couple who became famous artists pioneered the San Miguel de Allende foreign community.

San Miguel de Allende’s vibrant art and music scene is deservedly famous. Among the early pioneers responsible for this are two Canadian artists: Leonard and Reva Brooks. John Virtue’s book about the couple, subtitled Artists in Exile in San Miguel de Allende, explores their lives and careers.

Virtue paints a much more complex and enthralling picture of Leonard Brooks than of his wife Reva. After a relatively uninspired start, Virtue’s discussion of their careers really comes alive after the couple moves to San Miguel in 1947.

Both Leonard and Reva were enormously talented. Virtue argues that circumstances conspired to make it virtually impossible for Reva to pursue her career as a photographer when confronted by Leonard’s own growing fame as a painter and author. Instead, Reva curtailed her own artistic development to become her husband’s most active and devoted promoter.

The single person normally credited with being the pioneer of the art colony in San Miguel is Stirling Dickinson, an American who settled here in 1937 to run the town’s first school of Fine Arts. In the aftermath of the Second World War, Dickinson managed to convince many others to brave the trip south and enjoy the stimulation of new sights and sounds while eking out a living by teaching. Leonard, who had finished a stint as a war artist, arrived with his wife Reva in 1947.

They intended to stay only a year, while they worked out what to do next. They ended up staying more than 50 years.

Reva the photographer

Shortly after setting up home in San Miguel, Reva began to develop her photography skills. She proved to be a natural, always insisting on holding her twin-lens reflex camera directly in front of her heart, to ensure she would “feel connected to the subject”.

When asked to take a portrait of a child who had just died, Reva overcame her initial reluctance and agreed. The series of photographs she took that day has become world famous. Her portrait of the child was included in the San Francisco Museum of Art’s “Women of Photography”, after the Museum selected Reva in 1975 as one of the top fifty female photographers of all time.

Her powerful portrait of Eladia, the child’s grieving mother, was entitled “Confrontation”. It was published in the New York Museum of Modern Art’s “The Family of Man” exhibit, “the most viewed photographic show in history.”

Reva earned the recognition of such famous exponents of her art as Ansel Adams and Edward Weston. She would continue to take outstanding photographs, but none as compelling as those in her “Dead Child” series. Reva was 90 years old when she died in 2004. Her rich legacy includes some of the finest photographs ever taken in Mexico.

The one great unanswerable question is just how Reva’s photographic career would have developed if she had not decided to limit her hours behind the lens and in the darkroom to focus her energies instead on promoting her husband’s work.

The San Miguel art colony

Virtues’s meticulously documented work, full of details and anecdotes, reveals how San Miguel’s popularity mushroomed following an influx of GIs after the war visiting the town to attend the Fine Arts school where Leonard taught. A Life Magazine article in January 1948 only served to accelerate the trend.

Famous Mexican artists were also attracted to the town. For instance, David Alfaro Siqueiros, one of the “big three” Mexican muralists (alongside Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco) was invited to give classes. His appointment had unexpected consequences. Concerned about his left-leaning politics, and upset by his demands for unreasonable quantities of paint and other materials while executing a mural depicting Ignacio Allende, the art school’s owner closed it down.

Most of the teachers stayed on, opening a second school. It too ran into difficulties and closed in 1950. This time, several teachers, including Leonard and Reva Brooks, were given an armed escort to the border and expelled from Mexico under the infamous Article 33 of the Constitution. Fortunately, with the help of a campaign orchestrated by Siqueiros and other sympathizers, and of General Ignacio Beteta, who greatly admired Leonard’s paintings, the order was quashed ten days later, and Leonard and Reva were able to return. The art school moved to the Instituto Allende in renovated eighteenth century buildings with huge grounds.

As Virtue points out, anti-American sentiment is not a new phenomenon. In the early 1950s, the local priest in San Miguel, Father José Mercadillo, expressed violently anti-American feelings, going so far as to claim that Americans were “determined to make San Miguel a focus of communist propaganda”. There certainly were some American communists in the town, but Mercadillo eventually saw the light and became a true friend to the foreign community.

Claims about communist cells in San Miguel continued throughout the 1950s. Bart Quint, writing in the New York Herald Tribune in 1957 claimed that “two of Mexico’s most picturesque colonial communities – Cuernavaca and San Miguel de Allende – have become the headquarters of some of America’s riches and most active communists.”

And certainly, the exploding art (and music) scene in San Miguel attracted all kinds of luminaries to the town, from politicians and writers to artists and film stars. Even Hollywood moved in. The movie “The Brave Bulls”, starring Mel Ferrer, was filmed in San Miguel, leading to the memorable headline “Paradise of the Depraved” in the Mexico City daily Ultimas Noticias.

Virtue’s anecdotes recall a veritable who’s who of San Miguel society, including Heath Bowman, Charles Allen Smart and Mackinley Helm among many, many others.

Leonard the painter and author

Leonard Brooks’ reputation had grown. He “painted Mexico as the Mexicans painted it”. While his early paintings were usually representational, many of his later paintings were impressionist or abstract. They included collage acrylics, many inspired by his San Miguel studio and garden. A series of exhibitions in the 1950s received favorable reviews. Leonard’s paintings, and prints of Reva’s photos, were bought by most of the famous visitors to San Miguel, including film director John Huston.

Sales of his paintings were modest, but sufficient to encourage him to make regular trips to Canada, taking paintings to galleries in Vancouver and Toronto. In the late 1960s and 1970s, Leonard’s paintings, tapestries and collages were featured in several hugely successful exhibitions.

Inspired by his success teaching students, Leonard recognized the potential for “how to” books for artists. He wrote several best-selling books on painting techniques, bought by both beginners and professional artists, covering subjects such as watercolor, oils and collage. He also found the time to illustrate two articles in the popular monthly Ford Times, including an article about Mexico in the December 1953 issue.

Leonard, also opened, with others, San Miguel’s very first specialist art gallery.

San Miguel, the music center

Besides being a painter, Leonard Brooks was also an accomplished musician. He played first violin in numerous concerts with the Guanajuato Symphony. In the 1960s, he effectively launched, single-handedly, the San Miguel music scene, when he started to give free music lessons to local children. He badgered and cajoled friends into donating instruments and time, and subsequently headed the music program at the San Miguel Cultural Center for 25 years. Many famous musicians spent at least part of their vacation time in San Miguel; some played in his Chamber music quartet. Leonard encouraged dozens of local youngsters to play the violin. Among them were Daniel Aguascalientes and his five brothers. In 1976, they formed the now famous group Violines Internacionales de los Hermanos Aguascalientes, which plays concerts throughout Mexico and in some U.S. cities.

In 1992, the Leonard and Reva Brooks foundation was established at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. The aims of the foundation include ensuring the conservation and display of their joint art and photography collection, and providing scholarships and financial aid for Mexican students to study music at Queen’s University.

Any misgivings that Leonard might have had that his art was more appreciated in Mexico than it was in his native Canada, were finally laid to rest in 1998. In June of that year, both he and Reva held one-person shows in Toronto and in Kingston. The exhibitions, supported by national TV and press interviews, were a great success. Reva’s prints at the Bulger gallery in Toronto attracted the largest crowd the gallery had ever witnessed.

Leonard and Reva Brooks made a truly extraordinary contribution to San Miguel de Allende. Without them it would surely not have become the place it is today.

Source / Further Reading

The source for this article, and all quotes, is:

• John Virtue. Leonard and Reva Brooks – Artists in Exile in San Miguel de Allende. McGill-Queen’s University Press, Montreal, Canada; 2001.

Text © Copyright 2007 by Tony Burton. All rights reserved.

The post Did You Know? Famous artists pioneer art community in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico appeared first on MexConnect.

Did You Know…?

A Mexican who tried to revolutionize the world of classical music was once nominated for the Nobel Prize in Physics.

In 1950, Julián Carrillo was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Physics. The nomination was something of a surprise to the scientific community since Carrillo was far better known as one of Mexico’s top violinists and a composer who had invented a microtonal music system known as Sonido 13.

His early life was typical of many of the outstanding characters born during the Porfiriato period at the end of the nineteenth century. Born in 1875, Carrillo was the youngest in a family of 19 children. He studied music in San Luis Potosí from the age of ten and in 1895 went to study at the National Conservatory of Music in Mexico City, where he became very interested in the acoustic basis of music and the laws governing the generation of fundamental intervals. Conventional theory held that, when a string is divided by two, the pitch produced by either half of the string is twice the pitch produced by the whole string (i.e. it is one octave higher). The interval named a fifth is produced when a string is divided by three, and so on. Carrillo began to experiment and, on July 13, 1895, found that he could use a razor to divide the interval of a tone on a violin string into sixteen parts, producing no fewer than sixteen distinct clear sounds.

After hearing Carrillo play in 1899, President Porfirio Díaz awarded him a scholarship to study in Europe, where Carrillo quickly became a first violinist in the orchestra of Leipzig Royal Conservatory. During his time in Europe, he composed his ‘Sextet in G Major for two violins, two violas and two violoncellos’ (1900) and his ‘First Symphony in D Major for full orchestra’ (1901).

In 1904, he won a major prize at Ghent Conservatory’s International Violin Competition, before returning to Mexico, where President Díaz presented him with an Amati violin “as a gift from the Mexican Nation” for his excellent performance abroad. Carrillo became a violinist, conductor, composer and teacher at the National Conservatory, but fled to the U.S. in 1914, after the downfall of Victoriano Huerta’s government.

In New York City, he organized and conducted the American Symphony Orchestra and gave a successful performance of his First Symphony. He also composed the music for David Griffith’s film, “Intolerance.” While in New York, Carrillo also wrote the “Thirteenth Sound Theory”, which became the focus of much of his later life, and which threatened to revolutionize classical music. Why was it called Sonido 13 (13th sound)? Well, simply because Carrillo had ‘discovered’ the first pitch outside the traditional 12 semitones to the octave.

Four years later, Carrillo returned to Mexico and was appointed Conductor (1918 – 1924) of the National Symphony Orchestra, which enjoyed great success at this time, and Principal (1920 – 1921) of the National Conservatory. After 1920, he began to popularize Sonido 13, as the next stage in the evolution of musical composition, involving the use of intervals smaller than half a tone. Some of his detractors said that it was not possible for the human ear to perceive such small intervals; others argued that Carrillo must have stolen the idea from European musicians.

The first major Sonido 13 concert was on February 15, 1925 and included compositions by Carrillo and several of his students using quarters, eighths – and sixteenths of a tone, performed on specially adapted instruments. In December, 1925, Carrillo took Sonido 13 to Havana, Cuba. The next year, he returned to New York City where the League of Composers commissioned him to write a microtonal work. His ‘Sonata casi fantasia in quarters, eighths – and sixteenths of a tone’ was performed for the first time in the New York Town Hall on March 13, 1926. Afterwards, Leopold Stokowski commissioned another work, the ‘Concertino in quarters, eighths – and sixteenths of a tone’, later performed by Stokowski and the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra in New York and Philadelphia. In 1930, Carrillo organized the Thirteenth Sound Symphony Orchestra, in which all the musical instruments could play microtones. From 1930 to 1931, it was conducted by Carrillo and Leopold Stokowski.

During the latter part of his life, Carrillo continued to write widely about Sonido 13 as well as developing the appropriate instruments to play Sonido 13 music. In 1940, he applied for patents for a set of fifteen metamorphoser pianos, capable of producing, respectively, complete tones, thirds of a tone, quarters of a tone, fifths, sixths, sevenths, eighths, ninths, tenths, elevenths, twelfths, thirteenths, fourteenths, fifteenths, and sixteenths of a tone! Each piano had 96 keys, the same number as a regular piano, but the span in octaves of each piano depended on the fractions of a tone it was designed for. Hence, the piano for quarters of a tone covered four full octaves, while the piano for sixteenths of a tone covered only one octave! In 1949, the first metamorphoser piano (for thirds of a tone) was made and the following year Carrillo took it to the Paris Musical Conservatory. Also in 1950, in Pittsburgh, Leopold Stokowski conducted the first performance of ‘Horizons. Symphonic Poem for violin, cello and harp in quarter, eighths and sixteenths of a tone’. Further performances followed in Washington, Baltimore and Minneapolis. In 1958, a complete set of Carrillo’s 15 metamorphoser pianos won a Gold Medal in the Brussels’ World Fair.

Not surprisingly, Carrillo received numerous awards during his lifetime, including the Legion of Honor from France and the Great Cross of Merit from Germany. In Mexico, the government of his native state of San Luis Potosi declared July 13 (the anniversary of Carrillo’s 1895 experiment) a state holiday in honor of Sonido 13 and his birthplace, the small town of Ahualulco, was officially renamed Ahualulco del Sonido 13 in 1933. But perhaps the most surprising nomination he ever received was for the Nobel prize in physics. This came as a result of the experiments he made in New York University in 1947, when he proved that the conventionally accepted ‘node’s law’ had to be rectified, and that the frequency of the note produced by halving the length of a string is actually slightly more than twice the frequency of the base note. However, Carrillo didn’t actually win the Nobel prize; it was awarded to the Englishman Cecil Frank Powell for ‘his development of the photographic method of studying nuclear processes’.

To paraphrase an article published in the London Times, ‘Carrillo devoted his life to scrutinize an unsuspected microtonal world, undoing and rebuilding our chromatic musical scale. Even if we feel tempted to call him the disintegrator of the musical atom, this name does not do justice to the wonderful emotional world he has discovered. His is the greatest and the most surprising musical revolution since Terpander, the Greek musician, added two notes to the Chinese pentaphonic scale twenty six centuries ago’.

Carrillo died in Mexico City in September the 9th, 1965. His remains lie in the Rotonda de los Hombres Ilustres (the Rotunda of Illustrious Men and Women) in Dolores’ cemetery in Mexico City. Long may his music live on! ¡Viva Sonido 13!

This article is the basis for Chapter 25 in the author’s Mexican Kaleidoscope: myths, mysteries and mystique (Sombrero Books, 2016).

Author’s Note: This article relies heavily on the extensive website devoted to Carrillo including the detailed biography at https://paginas.tol.itesm.mx/campus/L00280370/julian.html  This site includes a list of Carrillo and microtonal resources, including downloadable microtonal music and details of Carrillo’s significance in the history of microtonal music.

For microtonal travel lovers, Ahualulco del Sonido 13 is located 39 kilometers northwest of the city of San Luis Potosí. Leaving that city, first follow federal highway 49 towards Zacatecas and then turn north on the road signed Charcas.

Copyright 2002 by Tony Burton. All rights reserved.

Published or Updated on: March 14, 2008 by Tony Burton © 2008

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Did You Know…?

Mayhem prevails in many Mexican cities during rush hours. The traffic in some big cities rarely seems to let up, or slow down, as vehicles jockey for the best position before becoming ensnarled in a tangled web of blocked intersections and jam-packed avenues.

Even thirty years ago, a standing joke (pun intended) in Mexico City was that the city’s largest parking lot was actually the ring-road or periférico. Built originally as a means of diverting traffic away from the downtown areas, the periférico (much of it 6 lanes wide in each direction) was swallowed up in the 1960s and ’70s as the city’s boundaries pushed inexorably further and further into the state of Mexico. The periférico no longer helped drivers escape the clutches of Mexico City’s traffic; it actively ensured that many would get trapped in it with no possible means of escape.

A casual observer of the traffic flows in most large Mexican cities could easily be forgiven for thinking that the entire experience is one best described as out-of-control anarchy.

But amazingly, some parts of the apparently chaotic daily movement of tens of thousands of vehicles between home and workplace are very carefully choreographed by traffic signs and police officials.

While most road signs, traffic signals and police gestures are self-evident, and unlikely to cause much confusion, there are some which newcomers need help to interpret correctly.

To help drivers out, police gestures are usually accompanied by penetrating whistles. These are delivered with wonderful over-statement by many traffic policemen, making them fully paid-up members of the Guild of Street Entertainers. It was several years before I discovered that their incessant whistles actually had very specific and well-defined meanings.

In Mexico City and the state of Mexico, a single short whistle means “Stop!”, while two short whistles means “Carry on!”. A single long whistle, however, means “Everyone stop!” Newcomers should be advised that the difference between one short and one long whistle may only become apparent when the vehicle immediately in front of them screeches to a complete, and totally unexpected, halt.

The system sounds simple enough, but, like so many facets of Mexico, it is not quite so simple as it first appears. Almost all traffic regulations are determined at either the municipal or the state, not federal, level. The fine print of traffic statutes therefore varies from one state to the next. The precise body positions used by the police when giving hand gestures (at least those used in directing traffic…), as well as the number, length and meaning of whistles, are all defined in the regulations.

Almost all states agree that one short whistle means “Stop!”, while two short whistles still means “Carry on!”. For other indications, though, the airwaves are somewhat more crowded.

For instance, in the states of Guanajuato and Nuevo León, three or more short whistles means “Speed up!” This is deceptively similar to the situation in Jalisco, where four short whistles means “Speed up!”. However, while in Jalisco, you’d better be aware that three “regular length” (i.e. neither long nor short) whistles are an indication for “All traffic to stop!” Newcomers who slam their brakes on when they hear three normal whistles in Guadalajara should beware of any Guanajuato or Nuevo León plated vehicle immediately behind them, whose driver may already be pressing his or her foot hard down to the accelerator…

Making matters even more complicated, while we have already seen that a single long whistle in Mexico City means “Everyone stop!”, in Jalisco, it officially means “Take care!” or “Proceed with caution!”

So, next time you’re caught in rush hour, or hopelessly lost while trying to navigate through an unfamiliar city, listen carefully, and at least avoid infringing, even accidentally, any of the many sound (pun intended) commands issued by traffic officials.

Drive safely, and remember, “Your children are waiting for you” and “Better late than never!”

Important disclaimer:

Your mileage may vary: the information contained in this article should not be construed in any way as legal advice. No responsibility is accepted for any use or abuse of the information contained herein.

This article is the basis for Chapter 28 in the author’s Mexican Kaleidoscope: myths, mysteries and mystique (Sombrero Books, 2016).

Traffic regulations (full Spanish-language text) on-line:

• State of Mexico:
• Municipality of Monterrey, Nuevo León

Text © Copyright 2006 by Tony Burton. All rights reserved.

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